The prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of American teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba is now wanted by Peruvian cops for viciously murdering a 21-year-old woman — exactly five years to the day after Holloway vanished.
Joran van der Sloot, 22, is believed to have brutally stabbed Stephany Tatiana Flores Ramirez in his Lima hotel room before rolling her corpse into a blanket and checking out Sunday.
Van der Sloot fled Peru on a bus Monday, slipping into neighboring Chile en route to Argentina, authorities said.
VIDEO: VAN DER SLOOT ON THE RUN
The blood-splattered body of Flores — the daughter of a former Peruvian presidential candidate — was discovered in van der Sloot’s hotel room only yesterday.
An arrest warrant for the suspect, a Dutch national, has been issued by the international police agency Interpol. Chilean police early today were scouring the areas near the northern border with Peru, hotels and backpacker hostels for van der Sloot.
“This is my daughter’s assassin,” said Flores’ dad, Ricardo Flores, a prominent circus operator, politician and former race-car driver, according to CBS News.
“We have all the evidence to show that the killer is this man,” Flores, 48, told CNN en Español.
“My daughter was stabbed. I think there was some kind of fight. The autopsy will determine that,” he said.
But van der Sloot’s New York lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, cautioned people not to jump to conclusions.
“Joran has a bull’s-eye on his back, and any time there is any foul play that could be connected to Joran, he’s an automatic suspect,” Tacopina said.
“It doesn’t mean he killed her.”
Tacopina said van der Sloot has not contacted him since he fled Lima.
Holloway, a blond, 18-year-old high-school student from Alabama, disappeared in Aruba after last being seen with van der Sloot outside a nightclub.
Van der Sloot never was charged in Holloway’s disappearance, despite being arrested and detained twice by authorities in Aruba.
It looks as if he won’t be so lucky in the Flores case.
The head of the criminal-investigation unit of Peru’s national police, Gen. Cesar Guardia Vasquez, yesterday told reporters that “homicide personnel are convinced, due to the incriminating evidence we’ve found, that this Dutch citizen is the person responsible for killing Stephany Flores.”
Van der Sloot, who has gallivanted around the world since Holloway’s disappearance on the Caribbean island, flew to Peru from Colombia to play in a poker tournament at the Atlantic City Casino in Lima. It’s unclear if he was with any friends at the time.
He checked into the Miraflores Hotel Tac in Lima on May 14.
Guardia said surveillance video shows van der Sloot and Flores, herself a poker aficionado, together in the casino Saturday night.
Flores’ dad said that he did not believe his daughter previously had known van der Sloot and speculated that they began chatting in English, which both spoke, when they met at the casino, according to CNN.
Flores left the casino to drop off some girlfriends at 2:35 a.m. Sunday, but then apparently returned.
Police said a guest and worker at the Miraflores Hotel Tac saw van der Sloot and Flores entering his room there at about 5 a.m. Sunday.
Van der Sloot then checked out of the hotel alone just four hours after arriving there with Flores, Guardia said.
It was not clear why it took three days for Flores’ body to be discovered. Her corpse, which was clothed, was lying face down on the floor, with abrasions on her face and body and signs of trauma, according to Guardia.
Flores’ father, who for days had feared his daughter had been kidnapped, told reporters that authorities believe she was slain at about 8 a.m. Sunday in van der Sloot’s room.
Ricardo Flores also said that police found Stephany Flores’ car about 50 blocks from the Miraflores Hotel, and that inside the vehicle were pills similar to ones used for date rapes, CNN reported.
Holloway disappeared on May 30, 2005, while she was on a high-school graduation trip to Aruba.
She was last seen with then-17-year-old van der Sloot and two pals, brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, outside a nightclub, Carlos’n Charlie’s, on the island.
The ensuing mystery about what happened to Holloway generated a media firestorm. Her body has never been found.
Van der Sloot was arrested in connection with the case in June 2005 and again in 2007. But he was never charged because of lack of evidence.
Still, the sensational case has continued to generate headlines for years, particularly over reports that van der Sloot has occasionally revealed details about what actually happened to Holloway that night.
In 2008, a Dutch journalist claimed van der Sloot had confessed to murdering her and then dumping her body in the sea. Two years later, a Dutch newspaper reported that van der Sloot had said Holloway fell off a balcony while drunk.
Van der Sloot’s prominent lawyer dad, Paulus, died while playing tennis in Aruba at the age of 57 in February.
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Aruba prosecutor’s office said Joran remains the main suspect in the Holloway case.
“What’s happening now is incredible,” said Ann Angela, the spokeswoman. “At the moment, we don’t have anything to do with it, but we are following the case with great interest, and if Peruvian authorities would need us, we are here.”
Holloway’s mother, Elizabeth Twitty, had no comment yesterday, according to her spokeswoman, Sunny Tillman.
Holloway’s dad, Dave Holloway, did not return a call seeking comment.
But the co-author of a book that Dave Holloway wrote about his daughter’s case lashed out at van der Sloot.
“I’m not surprised by this new development. I never doubted that Joran was capable of hurting women,” said R. Stephanie Good, co-author of “Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway and Corruption in Paradise.”
“I really hope that he gets what’s coming to him,” Good said. “It’s long overdue.”
Kathy Drenga, a Connecticut EMT who has traveled to Aruba to research the Holloway case and who maintained a Web site that tracked the search for Natalee’s body, said of van der Sloot, “I really hope they catch him. I’d really like to see him pay.”
Additional reporting by Ada Calhoun, Philip Messing, Jeane MacIntosh and Wire Services